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this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2026
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As an actual human who uses em dashes
or usually, two or three hyphens that turn into an em dash in Markdown
I feel personally attacked.
aren't those regular dashes? em dashes seem just a bit longer
N dashes. They are as wide as an n. M dashes are as wide as an m.
But what is em?
It's a width same as point size of a font: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Em_(typography)
Em means the letter M. That's what it's called. Historically, M in a font was equally as wide as it was tall, so it's used to refer to the font size.
I will usually just use one (1) hyphen for that purpose - in the much same way that I will use "..." instead of “...” - because I like to upset typography nerds.
Have you tried using the dedicated triple dot character (…) instead of three separate dots (...)? It's a life changer
They said they do it to ‘upset typography nerds’ — likely they tried…
I'm upset now
on mac if you type three dots it autocorrects it to the triple dot character…
Microsoft Word also appears to autocorrect dashes into em-dashes. I'm not sure it's because of copilot since I noticed around 2024, but a bunch of documents I use at work, drafted/revised in 2021, are full of them.
Word has been doing that for decades and I've always hated it and turned it off
Same, but I'm unlikely to use them in comments
Found the bot
Bless your — illiterate — heart.
Confidently incorrect. Read a book now and then.
Sure. You can totally avoid them. Just by using very basic sentences. The same is true for a lot of puctuation.
But that doesn't make your sentences planned better but is simply a sign of limiting yourself by avoiding any complexity.
No.
Read a book ✨
What does this say about how LLMs plan their sentences?